Strategy, Management and Technology Consulting Opportunities Looking Ahead

November 2008

Strategy, Management and Technology in a Services Economy

By: Kevin Curtis, Former CEO, Matrixx Advisory Services

Having just arrived home from a 5 week business development trip abroad, I was struck by one common factor as I spoke to leaders of major enterprises: devising, communicating and executing "strategy" in a constantly changing world.

Whereas managing globalization, operations, supply chain and cross functional alignment were the main factors on these leaders' agenda a few years ago, managing the customer interface and transnational execution are the 2008 factors of consideration. Enterprise leaders view nearly all other factors sighted to be subsumed and inherently linked to these new 2008 strategic impediments. And, the main element all these leaders are concerned about is devising strategy in this new environment where "prosumers" (customers in the production cycle) are in charge of design, production, channels and pricing. Nearly all those leaders I spoke with believe prosumerism to be a exciting opportunity but find devising strategy in this environment rather challenging and beyond their core competency. It is no wonder that the other two common factors on the minds of these leaders is talent and change management.

These factors, managing the customer interface, transnational execution, talent and change management bring to bear unique strategy, management and technology consulting opportunities.

Customer Interface - This is the opportunity to gauge the demand side in real-time and all the time; have the demand side involved in the creation of products and services and to create major discontinuities in technology innovation and business models. This would create an enterprise's Strategy and Business Framework. The consulting service delivery opportunities are comprised of deploying and running voice-of-customer (VOC) platform or VOC SaaS services; mining the business intelligence (BI) derived from this activity; integrating that BI with BI from other functional platforms (CRM, Financial, HR, SCM, ERP, the Web portal) as well as 3rd party market intelligence and synthesizing all that data to formulate strategy, business posture and go-to-market tactics for an entity's new products and, increasingly, services.

Transnational Execution - Simply put, this is localization and local execution while leveraging an enterprises scale-sensitive attributes such as its brand, HR and financial systems and resources. Successful transnational execution is a byproduct of effective collaboration, human capital management, global supply chain execution and real-time business process visibility. The consulting service delivery opportunities are comprised of M&A (largely for talent acquisition), global integration, Web 2.0 collaboration tools and use of the Services Oriented Architecture (SOA) for rapid integration and re-usable Web services across the global operational foot print of an enterprise.

Talent and Change Management - This, I believe, will be the core winning attribute of the successful enterprises of the future. This entails hiring and buying (M&A) the right talent, harnessing the power of that talent, keeping it at the leading edge of up to-date knowledge and skills and retaining that talent. And, in view of ever shifting basis of competition and the dynamic state of change, knowing what effective change management is and how to measure it. The consulting service delivery opportunities are a well balanced mix of core competency (Corporate/enterprise) assessment, skills assessment (Human Capital/Employees), M&A due-diligence, post M&A integration, strategy, customer, market and channel plans, interactive marketing and Web 2.0 analytical tools and visibility dashboards for C-Level and executives for decision support (DSS).

Technology Consulting - These, I believe, are the transparent but highly fundamental foundation of all above consulting opportunities. At the highest level, these include: Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), IT asset Mapping and Controls (CMDB), Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Enterprise Services Bus (ESB), Multi-Level Security (MLS) Architecture, Role and Rule Based Access Control and Credentialing, H/W and S/W or Application Virtualization, Software as a Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing.

In closing, it is my estimate that by 2012, above consulting and technology services delivery and advisory opportunities represents an additional $12b market opportunity worldwide for Strategy, Management and Advisory consulting services with slightly over ½ arising in the US market. The SaaS market could grow to be a $50b-$65b worldwide market as enterprises see the value of not procuring these functional business process platforms on enterprise basis (Capex savings) and in essence outsourcing business processes informationalization tools while focusing on their core competency and shifting the Capex costs from a fixed to a variable cost component of the operations by renting these functional platforms - a.k.a. SaaS.

Warm regards,

Kevin R. Curtis
kevinrcurtis@yahoo.com
Former CEO, Matrixx Advisory Services (Strategy, Operations and Technology Consulting)
http://www.matrixxadvisory.com/
Former CEO, SOA-iT (IT Consulting and SaaS Services), a Subsidiary of Matrixx Advisory
http://www.soait.com/
LinkedIn Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/kevincurtis1